Category: Reading

The thing that I’m thinking of this morning is reading X-Men comics. Online subscriptions are a thing, not that I couldn’t get other ways I want to, but I’m getting closer and closer to being caught up to the present. I think, right now, what I’m reading is near the middle of 2017, so I’m not even a year and a half in the past now. It’s taken me a number of years to get from the beginning to here, with easy, essentially unlimited access, and there have been a lot of great stories along the way. That hasn’t always been the case. It isn’t currently the case.

Keep in mind that I’m talking about the X-Men piece of the Marvel universe, specifically.

The 1960s X-Men were, frankly, immature, though fun. After all, it was the early days of superhero comics, so you got a lot of straightforward stories without much twisting us and very rarely dealing with anything beyond surface appearances.

In the 70s, and 80s, the storytelling was bigger, sometimes epic, broader, and mostly better. In small ways, at first, it began to deal with societal issues in ways that viewers of 1960s television would recognize: not very subtly and not very deeply.

In the 90s, things branched out even more. More titles, more frequent, just more. The universe became staggeringly huge, too big for any one person to take care of, to keep up with, to remember everything in. Continuity issues became constant, and those go on into today. Characters disappear only to reappear with a complete overhaul after years of absence and no explanation of what happened to them in between, no justification for why they’ve completely changed or why they hadn’t. Even if they’d been dead.

In the 2000s, the storytelling went downhill, and that continues into the present, too. You get multi-issue story arcs that resolve nothing and don’t even do anything to grow the characters because any character growth that happens disappears again as soon as the next story arc starts.

Honestly, reading the X-Men titles from say the past 10-12 years has been looking for the one good story mixed in with 10 mediocre and 14 crappy ones. I might be misrepresenting the ratios a little bit since mediocre versus crappy tends to matter of taste, but the good story arcs are definitely few and far between.

It really doesn’t seem to me like most the writers actually care about the characters. “I need the character to act this way for the story I want to tell, and I don’t care if it makes no logical sense, or if they would never do that. That’s what the going to do.” Consistency is actually important, folks.

And time compression is worse than soap operas. I’m honestly supposed to believe that the primary characters have gone through the comic events of the last thirty years while aging only a few months.

So if I’m really that unhappy with the state of the X-verse, why am I still reading?

I think it might be out of habit. Reading X-Men comics is something I do, so I read X-Men comics. And I seem to keep reading them no matter how frequently I’m disappointed in the result.

I wonder if that may be part of what keeps me coming back to other things as well. Habit.

Am I allowing myself to become stuck in various ruts?

Is it time to let go of some of them?

Are there things that would be a better use of my time?

That last one, at least, has an easy answer. Yes, there absolutely are. So that leads me into another question: why aren’t I spending my time on those things?

In the last few years, I’ve stepped up my reading. There was a time in my life when I read as many as 150 books per year. Those days are gone, consigned to my life before children and real career, and probably won’t come back unless I ever manage to retire (which isn’t in the cards for a lot of members of my generation). But I do have a little more time, and there are options beyond paper these days, so I should be able consume more books than I did when the kids were smaller. In 2017 my official count is 88. My Goodreads count is a little higher, but not everything I posted a review for actually qualifies as a book in my mind.

I break things into categories every year, and this year is no exception. Targets are:

Historical Award Winners Quest: 22. I’m on a long term quest to attempt all of the novel category winners of the Hugos, Nebulas, WFA, and Auroras, chronologically give or take and giving myself the freedom to say no or not finish a book. Putting this at 22 will take me to the end of 1990, with 2 I’m skipping this year for reasons.

Last Year’s Award Winners: 6. There are 8 major English-language awards in speculative fiction, if I leave out Horror, which I do. I try to hit the 4 biggest every year (Hugo, Nebula, WFA, Aurora), and at least 2 of the others.

Cultural Breadth: 6. Because there’s more to the world than just the English speaking world, I look to broaden my experience in the genre and find interesting things in translation.

Friends’ Books: 2. So far as I’m aware right now, I have two friends who have a published novel in the last year or so and I haven’t read them yet. Time to take care of these before they publish more.

Anthologies: 6. I still love short fiction and this will help me keep reading it, new and old. There are quite a few in the house waiting to be picked up.

Non-Fiction: 15. This goal seems to grow a bit each year, and is spread across 8 different subject areas. More of the world interests me.

Martial Arts: 6. Separated out from the rest of my non-fiction reading, to further the intellectual side of my martial studies, I’d like to read a book every two months here. And the books already on this reading list will keep me busy for the next seven or eight years at that rate.

Other Fiction: 17. This looks like kind of an arbitrary number, but it’s designed to take the overall total to 80. These are books I already have or might buy just because they look like I’ll enjoy them. I never let having too many books to read stop me from bringing home more. It’s not hoarding if it’s books.

So, 80, as I clearly telegraphed under “Other Fiction”, is the target for this year, and I’m well on track so far. Of course, we’re barely half-way through January.

But if 2017 was a weak writing year, it was a strong one for reading. Paper, electronic, audio, I consumed a lot of written words this year.

Without going into a lot of detail, because there will be plenty when the 2017 Reading Journey file is done, my category break outs are mostly pretty favourable.

Historical Award Winners: 17, and 4 DNFs

Last Year’s Award Winners: 6, and 1 DNF

Spec Fic Breadth: 7

Other Fiction: 40, and 2 DNFs

Martial Arts: 4

Non Fiction: 16

Which I make a total of 90 books. Add to that several hundred pieces of short fiction (including almost a million words of slush pile reading as a Publishing Assistant for Bards and Sages), and hundreds of comic books, and I read a lot this year.

I hope to match or beat it in 2018.

As far as things go, I gave exactly three 5-star ratings to book-length works this year, to:

The Shepherd’s Crown by Terry Pratchett – the last Discworld book, and it’s entirely possible that the fifth star was due to my sadness in never getting another new story in this world again.

Abaddon’s Gate (Expanse #3) by James S. A. Corey – loving this series. Of all the works in this universe so far, only a couple of the novellas have gone below four stars. But now I’m almost caught up. One novella and one novel, and I’ll have to wait on new work with everyone else.

So, Anyway by John Cleese – I very much enjoyed Mr. Cleese’s biography, only disappointed by the fact that it left off just as Monty Python began. Hoping for a sequel.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that the book reviews I’m posting here are more or less just taking up space. If you really want to know what I’m reading or have just read, you can hit me up on Goodreads, or even just wait until the beginning of the year.

Why then, you ask?

Well, I keep all of my book reviews in a single file for easy access, and have done that for the last couple of years. I’m going to turn these into a pdf (probably) for each year since I started keeping track and leave them lying around here somewhere for download.

I’m under no illusions such a file will be extremely popular, or even that anyone will necessarily care at all, but for the benefit of future generations, or someone’s amusement, or something, I thought I’d make them available.

But I’m not going to post individual reviews on my blog anymore. This space will be for mostly writing-related activities, though I expect you’ll find a few opinions on things finding their way in, too.

This is an odd little book, less a novel and more a series of interlinked shorts designed to present a strange thought-experiment society. This is a kind of social SF you don’t often see anymore, but the presentation is very “New Wave” which Silverberg drifted in and out of. (My favourite book of his, Across a Billion Years, doesn’t really qualify. I also haven’t read it in at least a couple of decades, so that favoritism may be coloured by nostalgia.)

But it is an odd book, crowded with ideas and sex.

Is it about over population?

Sexual freedom?

Privacy?

Post-scarcity?

Control?

Yes, to all of those.

1000-story buildings with 800,000 or a million people in each, built just far enough apart that their shadows don’t fall on each other and ninety-plus percent of the world is given over to farming and resource extraction to make those buildings possible.

People can have sex with whoever they want, however they want, whenever they want. Men are supposed to bang anyone they like and women are supposed to never refuse. You get married at 12 or 13 and have as many kids as your bodies allow.

There is just this side of no privacy and no one seems concerned, because privacy somehow breeds violence. No locked doors and no separate rooms beyond the one that marks where your living quarters start at the corridor. No barriers other than social constructs. But there’s also almost a complete absence of crime, and people guilty of antisocial behaviours are either corrected with some heavy duty drug therapy or tossed down the chute to provide a few extra watts of power to the urbmon (Urban Monad, i.e. giant skyscraper).

All food, resource, and energy problems appear to have been solved, at least for those who live in the urbmons. There are still a few people who actually have to do the work, though, and they have their own culture outside the walls.

Oh, there’s plenty of control, much of it in social constructs (surprise). In a society that’s supposedly progressive, the gender roles are still pretty rigidly defined, there’s a solid class structure with work you do defined by how high up in the building you live, status is critically important, a variety of min-altering drugs are not just easily available, but encouraged, and people aren’t allowed to leave their own urbmon unless they’re told to move to a new one. Oh, and keep having tons of meaningless sex and making babies.

There are a lot of things in this book.

Overall rating: 3 stars. It’s not a single story and the plot doesn’t hold together because there really isn’t one. The author is painting a picture. This is social SF as thought experiment, a presentation of a conceptual society and what it might mean or do to some of the people who live in it.

Remembering that this is historical SF now, published in 1971, I try to look at it through that lens and find that the concepts presented are really intriguing, but it was still written for a time and consumption and set of social attitudes that isn’t now, so some of the characterization is a little… out of date for me.

The world and universe being constructed here are interesting. We have clones, an immortality drug, a computer accessible directly by humans who possess the correct gene sequences, faster than light travel, and a galactic empire that fell a thousand years ago taking a lot of secrets with it. But we also have planetary monocultures, a variety of societal attitudes that are clearly from the 1970s and a pace that’s a little on the slow side with the various character lines taking too long to come together for me.

The minor characters are actually more fun than the majors. Particularly Tor (and her robot sidekick Pollux) and Jerusha. Actually, Jerusha is almost a major character, and noting her among my likes is going to make the beginning of the next paragraph a bit odd.

Her circumstances as police chief are a bit disappointing. Not so much her character (because she’s well written and strong), but the characters around her. I think, in 1981, it was a much bigger deal that she was a woman trying to manage in a “man’s job”, coming from a culture that’s inherently sexist. Thirty-six years on, this rings a little hollow, at least so far as western culture goes (note that I’m not saying true equality has been achieved, but it looks a lot closer than it did when this book was written, at least in most parts of the developed world).

The story borrows heavily from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of the same name, and there’s definitely a fairy tale feel at times, but there are also lots of similarities to Star Wars: parental issues, collapsed former galactic power, “the force”, hero’s journey, clones, societal control.

There’s a nice twist regarding the mers, which I won’t spoil, but the idea seems a little Dune-like for a while, the harvesting of a supposedly native species for something that basically grants immortality to humans (Water of Life = Spice). Like other things in the book, this feels like Ms. Vinge taking something we might already be familiar with and making it her own.

Overall rating: 3 stars, leaning towards 3.5. I did enjoy the book, but it’s tough, sometimes, reading something so modern and yet so not, which a lot of the now-older Hugo and Nebula winners are.

There are times when I want to give certain things a pass because of when a book was written, but I find it harder and harder to do so because I’m not reading it when it was written but with a gap of years or decades when culture and attitudes have changed. To me, in some ways, this book is railing against a sexism that has shifted considerably, and so the idea that a woman can’t be a police chief (for example) raises an eyebrow now, even if it is still going to be a much tougher slog for her than it would be for an equally qualified man. Still a long way to go, if maybe not quite as long as in 1981. And yet, I recognize that my view is probably narrower than I perceive it to be of how the world really is.

The Snow Queen is a well told, if a little slow-paced, story, but I’m at a point where I have to look at it through an historical lens.

The first is a sort of end of the world, death by raining moon fragments and saving of the human race by going into space kind of tale. Saving is relative, and by dint of a technology not quite indistinguishable from magic.

The second picks up 5000 years later, when the human race has recovered, and very nearly speciated in several directions.

It’s the second one I really wanted, the exploration of the cultures that resulted from such a difficult beginning. Unfortunately, that was the shorter of the two stories, and a little drier.

Not that the first story was bad, but I would have enjoyed a lot more expansion of the second. Never mind that this was already a 900-page book. I would have been okay with splitting the second story out into a novel of its own.

The first story is a classic pattern of success and setback, rinse and repeat, with victory barely snatched from the jaws of defeat each time, right up until the last “victory”, and that victory is tenuous in the moment. It’s not in the long term, as we move into the second story, but it sure doesn’t feel like a victory at the time. It’s hard to see how the species can possibly recover from such a winnowing down, but we only get the basic intention of how that’s going to happen, not the how itself.

The second story is a little more politically oriented, but the action and the plot are both still there and both still working. After 5000 years of change and growth and history and culture, we still come up with a bit of “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”. As long as there are people, there will be politics and conflict.

There’s a lot of infodump through the course of the book. Granted there’s a lot of science present, much of it speculative or extrapolative, and needing a lot of explanation. But sometimes, it’s too much. Especially when we’re talking orbital mechanics.

Most stories live or die with their characters, no matter how good the ideas or science might be, and Seveneves has a lot of them to choose from, some I loved, a couple I loved to hate, and a lot of whom just seemed to be there to serve the plot without getting a lot of detail of their own. The ones who got the detail, got a lot of it which was nice, and sometimes came through the eyes of other characters.

The cast is fairly inclusive but mostly on a geek scale, especially in the first half, and in both stories, there are a lot of people who work like hell to be good at their jobs in the ordinary course of events and then work even harder when everything is on the line.

There’s a lot of good balance here, gender-wise, and even some hints beyond just straight binary sexuality, but it never got in the way of the story and Mr. Stephenson was careful to make sure the characters he wanted us to care about were fleshed out. Most of these were women, as one might guess from the title.

Text density sometimes (often) slowed down the action. I know this is one of the things Mr. Stephenson is known for, but a paragraph that goes on for a page or more doesn’t always make me want to press through to the end of the chapter before I have to go do something else or turn out the light.

Overall rating: 3 stars. I enjoyed the book, though, like I said, wish I’d gotten more of the second story than I did. Based on where the first story ended, there was so much that could have been explored both culturally and politically and most of it was barely touched on in the course of the narrative. New things were coming to us almost to the very end of the tale.

If Mr. Stephenson ever returns to this setting, I hope it’s to the later time frame for a deeper look at the cultures that grew up after the hard rain, or maybe to some point critical in that growth.

I haven’t read much by David Brin in the past decade or so, which is weird. In my 20s, I loved the Uplift books and pretty much everything else of his I could get my hands on, at least until Earth which I needed two attempts to get through, but did enjoy the second.

Existence is a different kind of book than the Uplift novels, or really anything else I’ve read of his. The idea of Uplift was mentioned in the book, so maybe it could be counted as an alternate future history to his previous work, but the notion of Uplift wasn’t pursued in this reality beyond initial stages. Still, the results of those initial stages helped things work out pretty well for one of the characters.

Fundamentally, this is a theoretical answer to the Fermi Paradox seen through a particular science fictional lens. It’s a minor spoiler to use the phrase “interstellar chain letter”, but how we arrive at that and where the story takes us from there are both fun in the reading.

The inclusion of spectrum characters was cool, though felt a little incomplete to me. Granted that these were mostly extreme examples to draw attention to differences, I think Mr. Brin was effective in showing that the neurotypical way of looking at objective reality is not always the only way.

On the subject of inclusion, it was also nice to see that not just western characters and countries affected by the events in the story. How well those other nationalities were drawn is a question that’s hard to answer, but every character came across as distinct and believable to me. Your mileage may vary, particularly based on personal experience.

Still on the subject of inclusion, I don’t think there were as many female characters as I might have liked, but still more than I may be used to in similar higher concept SF.

And there are other themes present than just the Fermi Paradox, notably a taste of one flavor of what transhumanism might look like, at least in this version of the future, and the idea that technology conquers all.

For the first of these, it’s always interesting to me to see what other people thing the future of human evolution might hold. For the second, the answer to the problems created by misusing one set of technologies isn’t always be answered by another set, though it can be. Sometimes, learning how to use (or not misuse) what you’ve got might be a better initial solution.

Overall rating: 3.5 stars. I’d like to go four, because I really enjoyed big parts of the book, but I also feel like there are big chunks of story missing, huge jumps in time where interesting stuff must have happened but got glossed over or written off in a sentence or two.

And there are older stories and essays used as building blocks here, which may explain certain things not being followed up on as much as I’d have liked and characters whose stories ended without quite giving me the satisfaction of a completed story with them.

“Well into the 21st century, our species continues to participate in beliefs and customs that seem more suited to the Bronze Age than the Information Age,” direct from the blurb.

This is sadly, unfortunately, disturbingly true.

Even worse, there are some terribly frightening things presented in this book on how people, in the name of religion or belief or superstition or luck, treat their fellow creatures, and I don’t just mean human beings.

I knew a number of the things Mr. Andrews presents in this short read already, but probably less than half. There are several (and I won’t spoil it for you) I didn’t that I found absolutely hilarious, and several more I wish I still didn’t know.

That he treated everything in an equally humorous and relaxed tone was a nice bonus. Catholicism stands shoulder to shoulder with Hinduism, Mormonism, Scientology, and Jediism and Dudeism (in which I’m ordained, by the way, and you can be too if you want). Snake handling, e-meters, fortune telling and faith healing are all present. So is the Satanic Panic.

While you cruise through the book, you get the feeling that it was a struggle to keep the book this short. I’m fairly certain the author could have come up with the humour to triple the length. It would still read well and he would still have only scratched the surface of weirdness. Humans, after all, have the tendency to believe some pretty crazy sh!t if you let them.

Overall rating: 3 stars. Why only three? Well, I went into things expecting a humour book, and that’s mostly what I got. But for every scenario, every religion, every belief, every chuckle at every weird belief in the book, I kept having the thought in the back of my mind: “Wait, there are people who actually believe this?” That realization tempered the humour quite a bit.

I might have appreciated a bibliography, though, or at least a reference list to pursue more detail on some of the stranger things presented.

While I enjoyed the book overall, I finished it with an odd sense of disappointment.

It’s filled with references that are aimed directly at me, everything from The Time Machine to Looper to Star Trek and Doctor Who to classical written SF. He references movies, television, novels, and short stories, the majority of which I’m at least passingly familiar with. Time travel is such a SF standard that you can’t blink at Schrodinger’s Cat without having a paradox fall to one side.

But that’s most of the book.

Much of the rest was how the language of time travel has slowly insinuated itself into our culture as a whole. This was both interesting and cool, but it still comes up short for me.

I wanted, needed, thought I was getting, something more. Where was the comparison of the various presentations of temporal mechanics? Where was the treatise on how the notion of time travel affects us as people and as a society? Where was the ranking of paradoxes and the ways around or through them?

Quite likely, I should have taken the title a little more literally. This was very much a history of Time Travel inside the genre with little forays outside of it.

Overall rating: 3 stars. Like I said above, I liked it, but I wanted to like it a lot more. There’s a lot of stuff missing. I was looking for more philosophy in this book, I think, and more science. What I got was a pleasant tour through a lot of familiar SF pop culture territory, but I could get most of that already by going through my own bookshelves or video library or Netflix.